Manufacturing & Supply Chain
Change control without the binder
Engineering changes, supplier qualification and non-conformance dispositions routed by what the change actually touches.
What this usually looks like today
An ECO waits three weeks because it went to the whole distribution list instead of two people.
Nobody can say which revision was in effect when the part shipped.
Quality holds are released by whoever is on the floor at the time.
Workflows
What manufacturing & supply chain teams run in Branchsolve
Each of these is a description away. None of them is a template you have to adopt.
Engineering change orders
Affected parts, tooling impact and customer notification requirement decide who reviews.
Supplier qualification
Audit report and certifications attached, quality and procurement reviewing in parallel.
Non-conformance disposition
Use-as-is, rework and scrap each route differently, and scrap above a value reaches the plant manager.
Tooling and fixture spend
Routed by amount and by whether the tooling is customer-owned.
First article approval
A task step where quality records the measurement result before the step can resolve.
Production hold release
Requires quality sign-off, and the person who raised the hold cannot release it.
Routing
Thresholds you can see before you commit
Branchsolve derives the boundary cases from the workflow’s own rules and shows you where each one lands. Nobody types this table out — it falls out of what you described.
Engineering change order
- Documentation onlyEngineering lead
- Form, fit or functionEngineering lead, then Quality
- …and tooling changes…plus Manufacturing engineering
- …and a customer is affected…plus Account management, in parallel
Questions we get from manufacturing & supply chain teams
Does a change to the workflow affect open ECOs?
No. Published versions are immutable. Requests already in flight finish on the version they started on; new ones use the new version.
Can we import our supplier and engineer list?
Yes — CSV, Excel or a pasted table, through a preview-then-apply review. Leaving someone out of a file never deactivates them; that takes an explicit status column.
What if a request needs to go back a step?
A rejection can return the request to an earlier step instead of closing it. The loop is bounded — you set the maximum number of returns — and every pass is kept in the history.
Your process doesn’t have to be on this list
If you can describe it, Branchsolve can run it. Bring the one that causes the most arguments.
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